Day 2: International Bellydance Conference of Canada, 2010

Day 2 of the 2010 International Bellydance Conference of Canada started out at 9am with Anatomy of Bellydance by Dr. Aurora Ongaro, professional chiropractor as well as Artistic Director of edVenture Arts Academy in Edmonton, Canada. Her presentation focused primarily on explaining the interaction of muscle groupings around the shoulder, back, abdominals and feet. For each area, she explained common problem areas encountered by new students and discussed methods of safe execution or training. For example, instead of crunches for improving belly rolls, she recommends core strengthening exercises that involve an unstable surface. Or for students complaining that backbends pinch, remind them to stabilize the back muscles by engaging front abs. To free up more muscles in the abdominal and back muscles, she recommends using hamstrings instead of lower abs to tuck the pelvis. As long as the student doesn't lock their knees or squeeze their glutes while engaging the hamstrings, they will safely be able to tuck their pelvis. She encourages students to cultivate body awareness by having them poke and prod their muscles to determine when muscles are properly engaged. Strong dancers must have solid body awareness and some of this responsibility includes understanding how muscles work together.

Anatomy of Bellydance lecture was followed by Rhythmic Notation for Bellydancers by Dr. George Sawa. This musician is a master. He began the lecture by covering the history of notation over the centuries starting with the system of Ishaq al-Mawsili (died in 850) to the Prosodic System of Al-Kindi (died 870) to the Precise System of al-Farabi (d. 950) to the Pre-Modern Arabic Era to the system of Safiyy al-Din (d. 1924). After the historical significance of each system, Dr. Sawa described the system he developed that notates each drum pattern by a visual circle that moves through each dumm, takk and rest in a continuous circle.



He played examples of several rhythmic patterns from his CD's Egyptian Music Appreciation and Practice for Bellydancers. The 2 CD set released two weeks ago includes an extensive booklet explaining all 21 rhythms used in Egyptian music (rather than the subset included in most rhythm CDs for dancers), Melodic Modes, Musical Forms and full color photos of 35 instruments. Side note: The tambourine percussionist creating embellishments over the drum rhythm in the CDs is in his 80s and has performed with Samia Gamal, Taheyya Carioca, Mohammad Abdel-Wahab, Farid el-Atrash and toured worldwide with Feyrouz. That's reason enough to get this learning tool.

For more photos and reviews of Day 2, visit my blog Conversations on Dance.
Enjoy,
Yasmin